The man who inspired '21'

Wednesday

Mar 26, 2008 at 12:01 AMMar 26, 2008 at 12:14 PM

It doesn’t take an MIT grad to know that Hollywood plays fast and loose with reality when they claim a movie is “based on fact.” Just ask Jeff Ma. He is an MIT grad. And he’s also cofounder of the “sports stock market” Web site Protrade and co-creator of the sports video network Double Play TV. More to the point, he’s a former member of the MIT blackjack team that succeeded in breaking the bank in Las Vegas for a couple million dollars in the mid-1990s. He’s had a front-row seat to what happens when Hollywood gets its hooks on a story.

Ed Symkus

It doesn’t take an MIT grad to know that Hollywood plays fast and loose with reality when they claim a movie is “based on fact.”

Just ask Jeff Ma. He is an MIT grad. And he’s also cofounder of the “sports stock market” Web site Protrade and co-creator of the sports video network Double Play TV. More to the point, he’s a former member of the MIT blackjack team that succeeded in breaking the bank in Las Vegas for a couple million dollars in the mid-1990s. He’s had a front-row seat to what happens when Hollywood gets its hooks on a story.

“A lot of people now are fixated on the idea of what’s true and what isn’t true and how accurate it is,” he says of the film “21,” which is based on the book “Bringing Down the House” by Harvard grad Ben Mezrich, who based his book on the story of Ma and his card-counting MIT pals.

“But the reality is, who cares?” Ma says. "The film is not supposed to be a documentary, and Ben was not writing a journalistic book. This is all about entertainment. It’s a great story. That’s all that really matters at this point.”

Yet Ma, who now lives in San Francisco, turns right around and praises the care that was taken to retain some accuracy in the film.

Sure it’s a little strange that Ma, a tall, broad Asian fellow, is played in the film by British actor Jim Sturgess (“Across the Universe”), who Ma laughingly describes as a “skinny white guy."

“But Jim’s speech coach called me and asked me to say a bunch of words over the phone so she could record them for him to imitate,” Ma says. “I used to have a horrible Boston accent. So there’s supposed to be a tint of Boston accent in him.”

The film came about after the huge success of Mezrich’s book, the idea for which started at a party in the mid-’90s.

“It was at an Oscar party,” remembers Boston resident Mezrich, who had graduated from Harvard a few years earlier. "I went there with a girl who ended up being Jill in the book. She made me change a lot about her because she was really secretive. But she was saying to me, ‘You’ve gotta meet this guy Jeff.’ “

They met at that party, hit it off, and started hanging out together.

“Jeff always tended to have hundred dollar bills,” Mezrich says. “In Boston you never see hundred dollar bills. In Vegas and New York yes, but not in Boston. I soon realized there was a great story. We developed a good friendship over the course of me interviewing him and going out to Vegas with him and seeing him in action.”

Of course, everything about the card-counting system that the MIT folks developed and perfected was top secret. The matter of trust between writer and subjects came up quite often, and didn’t always work smoothly.

“Jeff opened up to me,” Mezrich says, “but there were other members on the team who would not talk to me. The thing is, I never went into this as a journalist. It was a vicarious thrill for me. I wanted to hang out with these guys, who were living like rock stars in Vegas, and I wanted to be a part of the team, even though my math skills are non-existent. So I inserted myself in the story as one of them.”

“Ben was trying to capture the spirit of what happened,” Ma explains. “That may not include every single detail of what happened. He wasn’t taking really detailed notes about things. He was trying to get a vibe. He was spending time in Vegas with me, and was able to catch that.”

And then there were those changes, one of which was Jeff Ma’s name. In the book he’s called Kevin Lewis. In the film, he’s Ben Campbell.

“One of the reasons Ben changed my name was because about two or three months into the process, I freaked out a little bit, and I said to him, ‘I don’t know if I want you to write this book anymore.’ But I got more comfortable about it with him changing my name. I saw a bunch of drafts throughout the process and made some comments, and asked him to take some things out or change some things that were too personal for me … and he did.”

A major change in the film involves a security consultant (menacingly played by Laurence Fishburne) who catches on to the scam and pulls the Ben Campbell character into a back room, then thrashes him as part of – using Vegas terms – a beatdown.

Ma insists that never happened to him.

“Actually I was pretty good at just leaving,” he says, referring to instances when he and his team were caught counting. “Casinos can’t detain you if you leave, but people do get intimidated when the casino people come over. They’ll often say, ‘You’ve gotta come with us.’ But the reality is that you don’t have to. You can just leave. There’s nothing you’re doing that’s illegal. Some of the people on our team did go, because they were stupid, and they would retain them there and ask them questions. I heard that it was pretty frightening, even if Laurence Fishburne wasn’t there waiting for you.”

“21” opens on April 28.

Ed Symkus can be reached at esymkus@cnc.com.

Fast Fact: Jeff Ma would now be recognized at (and probably asked to leave) any blackjack table in Las Vegas.